Are the Poor affected by Food Security ?

In the course of reviewing Food Security of Sabah, there were two distinctive visits to the districts that opened my eyes to understand the meaning of Food Security there. It opens up a completely new meaning of Food Security to various people groups of Sabah.

Food is essential to survival of human beings but human beings are highly adaptive. In the study of Food Security impacts on the poor, we made two rather unexpected discovery that :-

1) The Rural Poor will fair better than the Urban Poor

I was visiting Sapulut Mission Field Center in 2012 and found their daily menu had lots of vegetables and very little protein like meat and not even eggs. I saw that they have a completely different diet from city folks. They may be farmers and but being too far from towns, there is no place to sell their produces except to barter trade or consume themselves for weeks.  When they need protein, they will go into the jungle to hunt or down the river to catch fishes. Life is that simple. No money is involved unless its for "luxurious" items such as tea, coffee, sugar (I think milk is super expensive to them). 

The Urban Poor mainly comprises of kampung folks like school leavers who left their rural villages to work in urban towns and cities, their income is either minimum wages of RM800 per month or higher as they progress to supervisory role. But, they have to rent a place in urban area, share room, work long hours (some even double jobs) and have little time to cook, hence they eat out. The urban poor has difficulty saving for rainy days. After paying rental, mobile fees (which is essential in towns and cities), there is hardly any left for food. So they eat poorly. 

Meanwhile back in the kampung and rural area, they do not have employment, there is no stable income aside from what they could sell from their agricultural produce. They are very poor, in fact, statistically, they are called the hard-core poor. But they can bring food to the table for their families through their land produce, hunting or fishing. They could also barter trade with neighbours. The rural poor has no money but they have food from their backyard.

2) Food Smuggling out of country to neighbouring country is imminent and causing massive loss especially with food subsidy. 

In our field trip to Sandakan to meet up the professors experts group in 2012, we made a visit to a local supermarket after work, we arrived 6 pm and we were told that shop is selling imported stuff really cheap, so we were there to check it out. 

My friend and I stood outside this giant supermarket in down town Sandakan, we stood there amazed by the sight that we saw, actually we were shocked and dumb found ! We saw one patron of the supermarket usually be a team of 3 to 4 persons, each team had many trolleys (giant trolleys), they bought everything in the largest quantity packing and in bulk, Like 10 Kg rice grains, they would buy 30-50 packs; Maggie Mee in box, they would buy large containers comprising many boxes within. Then, it dawn on us that these must be traders or tuck shop owners but why such high volume? Who has the money to buy these items if they are poor ?  The only obvious answer is that they are bringing the food using boats to the near by islands and sell the in the Philippines ! When we studied their food choices, most of the items were subsidised by the government of Malaysia ! What a loss to our national finances. They just smuggle our subsidised food out on daily basis in large quantity !

After that night of observation, I am now a "converted" believer of no-subsidy by the government, it is not healthy because some of our people do not benefit from the subsidy and it get smuggled by the millions out of our country ! I think Food Coupons are better solutions and should be given to the citizens.